Am I Blacklisted from the Free Press?

There is a complex system of filters in the media and educational institutions which ends up ensuring that dissident perspectives are weeded out, or marginalized. The end result: what are called opinions 'on the left' and 'on the right' in the media represent only a limited spectrum of debate, which reflects the range of needs of private power.

So what the media do is take the set of assumptions which express the basic ideas of the propaganda system and then present a range of debate within that framework - so the debate only enhances the strength of the assumptions, so it would seem to be the entire possible spectrum of opinion that there is.

In fact, if the system functions well, it ought to appear to have a liberal bias. Because if it appears to have a liberal bias, that will serve to bound thought even more effectively.

In other words, if the press is indeed adversarial and liberal, then how can I go beyond it? They're already so extreme in their position that to go beyond it would be ludicrous. So therefore it must be that the presuppositions that are accepted in the liberal media are sacrosanct- can't go beyond them. A well functioning system would in fact have a bias of that kind.

Couldn't have said it better. However, what makes the London Free Press even more questionable than papers like the Toronto Sun is the fact that it tries to present its extreme right views as reasonable, moderate and sometimes even liberal (whereas other Sun papers are upfront about their conservative leanings). For instance, the Freeps will support safe and popular causes such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but will write at length against issues involving labour rights, native land claims (mostly rightwing columnists as opposed to editorials) and using budgetary money to invest in progressive priorities (affordable housing, reducing postsecondary tuition, raising the minimum wage).

The other unfortunate thing about the Freeps is that its best and most progressive writers are all reporters instead of columnists, so their opinions are never heard in a political context. This is because, in the view of elites, working class people are not supposed to know about what's actually going on in the world. Nor are they supposed to get invovled in politics in a manner that threatens elite power structures or development. Although I don't profess to know much about the situtation in Caledonia, protesting for native land rights falls under the latter description.

For probably the best interpretation of WHY mainstream media is the way it is, see Noam Chomsky's "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream": http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/z9710-mainstream-media.html